Broken Prey

excitement of the killing had done something to him, had taken him to a level where the mundane realities of the process had slipped away from him. He had to check for blood, he had to clean up, he had to do all the little chores that the Gods Down the Hall had forgotten. He had to remember, the Gods Down the Hall were smart enough, but they were Down the Hall because they’d gotten careless.
    He never thought it would happen to him, a mistake like that, an oversight, because he was too smart—but now he saw how it could happen. The motion, the push to move, could get on top of you. Next time, he would have a checklist with him, a written to-do list. If he were going to kill for pleasure, he’d mix hard science with the art of passion. No way he wanted to end up Down the Hall—far better to be dead.
     
    THE NIGHT WAS WARM and hazy, with a low overcast, and as the killer drove across the prairie, the small towns would first come up as a glow in the sky, street and business lights reflected off the cloud base, then as points of light, then as a harsh blue-white and orange-white grid. He passed through them silently, slowly, safely, taking no risks with the speed limit.
    Forty-five minutes after the killing, he pulled into a turnout at a historical marker. He drove by the place daily and had never seen a car in it. At the same time, the turnout road ran through a small alley of trees and brush, out of sight of the road.
    He got out, lifted the trunk lid. Charlie was lying on a carefully arranged bed of logging chain. He pulled loops of the chain around the body and, with precut five-inch loops of aluminum wire, fastened together opposing links from the chain.
    He worked quickly in the weak light of the trunk lid, listening for cars on the gravel road; nobody came down it in the hurried, heavy five minutes of work. He was alone with the dead man and felt a small curl of hair-raising superstitious dread. What if Charlie’s eyes opened . . .
    He giggled again. Hell, he’d have a heart attack is what would happen. But Charlie was as dead as a carp on a riverbank, and his eyes didn’t open. The killer shut the lid on the car trunk, backed out of the historical site—he had no idea of what it marked—and on to the road.
    The bridge was only a half mile away. He took the gravel out to the blacktop, turned left, idled over a low hill. A car was coming toward him. He saw it move to the middle of the road as it crossed the bridge, then back to the right as it cleared it. He idled along at forty miles an hour, checking the rearview mirror, looking for lights, and watching for lights out front . . .
    When he was sure he was clear, he hurried on down the hill to the bridge; stopped in the middle of it, popped the trunk, and walked over to the railing and looked down. Sometimes fishermen parked beside the bridge: there was just enough space for two cars. Never, as far as he knew, at night: and there was nothing this night . . .
    He went back to the car trunk, dragged Charlie out. With the extra weight of the chain, he struggled to get him to the railing. When he got him there, he had to lift Charlie’s legs first, prop them on the railing, then walk around to pick up Charlie’s head.
    And when he did, the feet fell off the rail. He was breathing hard and felt a little panic rising in his throat: this was impossible. He couldn’t get the body high enough to prop up the head end. He finally bent it upright, got Charlie’s neck hooked over the sharp edge of the rail, took a breather for five seconds, then hoisted the dead man’s chest over, balanced the body, then got the feet going. The chain caught on the edge, and he spent a moment wrestling back and forth, the chain making a loud ripping noise on the metal guardrail.
    And then Charlie went, falling into the darkness. A moment later, the killer heard a satisfying splash from below: Charlie’s last dive was a belly flop into thirty feet of water.
    He brushed his hands together, felt the stickiness. As he walked around the front of the car, he looked at them in the headlights. Jesus: he was covered with blood. Hadn’t thought about that, either, Didn’t have any way to clean up. He knelt in the headlights, looking as his shirt. More blood . . .
    Man, the complications were piling up. If he was going to do all this, if he was going to do what the Gods Down the Hall demanded that he do, he was going to have to get a hell of a lot better than this.
    And